AIR Pollution - Part II
Disclaimer again: No swfs, libraries, Air runtime, tools were harmed during the making of this application.
Aperture employs a Win32 user level hooking technique called export forwarding. In the current version the msi.dll component is used that contains functions exported for Microsoft Installer packages.
The proxy dll creates function stubs that do nothing but jump to the exported addresses in the original dll, so all calls are delegated to the original msi.dll.
When the AIR application starts the NT DLL Loader sets up the dll initialization list from the static imports found in the PE header. If the proxy msi.dll exists in the application’s folder it will be loaded from this location. The proxy dll then will load the original dll (from the Windows system folder) and forward all calls to the original component.
Once a specific call is intercepted the proxy dll starts the Aperture system, preparing the LocalConnection communication with the current AIR application. And when your AIR ActionScript code starts running Aperture is already listening for commands.
To put it simply: the above stuff means that if the proxy dll is in the AIR application folder and you are on Windows then you have access to the Aperture system. The AIR application will work just fine on any other OS but without native library access.
COM, IDispatch anywhere
The Aperture system dispatches messages from AIR to objects that support OLE Automation (IDispatch). This is how COM “reflection” works. Please note that the provided libraries (apsystem, apimaging, apoutlook) are also ATL COM libraries but Aperture has the ability to work with them without registering their type library.
This is to avoid the necessity of a special installation to register the COM components so an AIR application using the framework will not need any special installation step.
All the libraries provided are statically linked and there are no external dependencies that must be satisfied.
And what about .NET?
Calling .NET assemblies is also possible via COM Interop but currently there is no way to distribute these assemblies without proper registration (you have to go through registration with the RegAsm tool).
FluorineFx Aperture Framework
You can find the framework here